1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, processing method thereof, and computer-readable storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, as digital cameras have become widespread, there are increasing cases where a plurality of people each participate with their own camera at a given event, and those people respectively shoot pictures of each other during the event. Also, there has been a sudden increase in cases where shot images are used by registering the images at a viewing site that supplies public albums, private albums, and so forth, and exhibiting the images to an unspecified large number of users, or to specific people.
Furthermore, there are also a large number of services for printing albums from those sites. For example, technology is known whereby selection of images to be used in an album is performed according to a popularity vote by viewers (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-070614). Technology is also known whereby approval by a concerned person is required in order for a specific operation to be performed on a shared document (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 05-54036).
Conventionally, selection of images to be used in an album or the like is entrusted to the creator of the album, and so the wishes of both the supplier of the images and the wishes of viewers of the images are not reflected.
Also, with increased capacity and reduced price of recording devices such as digital camera memory, hard disks, and the like, there is an increased tendency to shoot a large amount of images. Therefore, much time and effort is involved in selecting images to be used in an album or the like from among a large amount of images after shooting. Furthermore, there has been no consideration of, when selecting the images to be used in an album, assigning a multi-valued evaluation to each image and using that evaluation to perform selection.